Posts Tagged ‘New York World’

As we we slip off into Big Apple dreams, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that Willie Mays, in his first game as a NY Met, hit the homer that beat his alma mater, the (San Francisco) Giants, 5-4.

On this same date in 1888, baseball enthusiast and (then New York) Giants fan, DeWolf Hopper first performed Ernest Thayer’s then-unknown poem “Casey at the Bat” at a game between the Giants and the Chicago Cubs. “The audience literally went wild,” the New York World reported the next day. “Men got up on their seats and cheered… it was one of the wildest scenes ever seen…” By coincidence, August 14th, 1888 was Ernest Thayer’s 25th birthday. Hopper’s gift to Thayer kept on giving: Hopper was the prime agent of the poem’s growing fame: he went on to recite it publicly over 10,000 times– in theaters, over the radio and on record (click here to hear), and ultimately in an early film.

Clement Clarke Moore’s famous poem, originally entitled “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” has been a Christmas staple since it’s publication (in The New York Sentinel) on December 23, 1823. But it has surely never been as deeply explored nor as richly interpreted as by the director of Caves Of Forgotten Dreams, Encounters At The End Of The World, and Grizzly Man:

As we sigh at the Existential ennui of it all, we might recall that it was exactly 90 years later– on this date in 1913– that Arthur Wynne’s “word-cross,” the first crossword puzzle, was published in the New York World:

2-3. What bargain hunters enjoy. 6-22. What we all should be.
4-5. A written acknowledgment. 4-26. A day dream.
6-7. Such and nothing more. 2-11. A talon.
10-11. A bird. 19-28. A pigeon.
14-15. Opposed to less. F-7. Part of your head.
18-19. What this puzzle is. 23-30. A river in Russia.
22-23. An animal of prey. 1-32. To govern.
26-27. The close of a day. 33-34. An aromatic plant.
28-29. To elude. N-8. A fist.
30-31. The plural of is. 24-31. To agree with.
8-9. To cultivate. 3-12. Part of a ship.
12-13. A bar of wood or iron. 20-29. One.
16-17. What artists learn to do. 5-27. Exchanging.
20-21. Fastened. 9-25. To sink in mud.
24-25. Found on the seashore. 13-21. A boy.
10-18. The fibre of the gomuti palm.